IN THE AIR

This month, two of America's most psychologically astute and darkly comic fiction writers publish novels about the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. On the surface Don DeLillo’sFalling Man and Helen Schulman's A Day at the Beach are remarkably similar, from their blue-sky covers to their main characters, estranged couples—each with a small child—living in downtown Manhattan, to their central haunting image of the man who, realizing that rescue was impossible and death imminent, chose to jump. While Schulman's couple flees to the Hamptons, and DeLillo's stays in Manhattan, neither can escape the psychic reverberations of the attack. Each writer captures the moment when tragedy drew the world together, and leaves the reader with the bittersweet knowledge that we did come together, and then fell apart.

E. S.